Suit: cabin noise deafened man

“An Oregon man who was flying home from the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport pleaded with a Delta Airlines flight attendant about the ‘extreme discomfort’ he was enduring because of a loud noise during the nearly four-hour flight.” Kent Neilson says he suffered permanent hearing loss and tinnitus and wants $2 million. [Oregonian]

I’m going to suggest that he had defective ears to begin with if a four-hour flight caused so much damage. The 99.999% who fly regularly report no such harm, so this does appear to be idiosyncratic and impossible to predict.

Having said that, I find noise-cancelling headphones one of the greatest inventions of the 20th C. They take the wear-and-tear of air travel down several notches.

I have spent quite a bit of time near F-14s and F/A-18s on full afterburner and suffered minimal hearing loss.(aircraft carrier flight deck) I just rode Delta out of Minneapolis-St. Paul last week in one of those cigar tubes with wings they call an aircraft and actually found them to be kind of quiet.

@Jim Collins: One of my offices was at the end of a military/civilian airfield. F-15 demonstrators operated out of that field. They would practice regularly, going vertical right over over my head. They weren’t quite as awesome as the C-5As coming in to land.

Worst of all, though, was the Concorde on takeoff.

I’m definitely on the deaf side of the line. Which is a mixed blessing, actually. It sucks for the people with whom I converse and constantly ask to repeat themselves. It’s good for living in a city. I don’t hear the noise at all, short of sirens.

I’ve got about a 15% loss myself, but it took quite a while to get it. I do not believe that you can acquire such a loss in just one flight on a relatively quiet aircraft. If you want pure noise, I reccommend the A-37. It isn’t called “Tweety Bird” for nothing.